How a post-Davos email ignited a scandal

Just as the Definers scandal appeared to be receding into the distance, a trio of new stories have pushed the controversy — and Facebook’s chief operating officer — back into the spotlight. New questions have emerged regarding the timeline of Facebook ordering up opposition research on the financier George Soros, Sheryl Sandberg’s role in the decision, and her ongoing work with the PR agency. In a year when trust in Facebook has declining, the latest revelations threatened another setback.

On Thursday evening, BuzzFeed and the New York Times published stories about Sandberg’s role in the Soros affair. Citing an internal email, the stories report that the COO personally requested information about Soros “within days” after he gave a speech critical of Facebook at the World Economic Forum. Here are Nicholas Confessore and Matthew Rosenberg in the Times:

Ms. Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, asked for the information in an email to a senior executive in January that was forwarded to other senior communications and policy staff, the people said. The email came within days of a blistering speech Mr. Soros delivered that month at the World Economic Forum, attacking Facebook and Google as a “menace” to society and calling for the companies to be regulated.

Ms. Sandberg — who was at the forum, but was not present for Mr. Soros’s speech, according to a person who attended it — requested an examination into why Mr. Soros had criticized the tech companies and whether he stood to gain financially from the attacks.

Sandberg had previously accepted responsibility for hiring Definers in part to go after Soros. But she also distanced herself from the decision, saying she could barely recall the decision or anything about the company’s work. News that she had directed an inquiry into Soros cast her previous statements in doubt. And of course, it’s plausible that both things are true: she directed an inquiry into Soros, and didn’t know Definers would be the ones doing the opposition research.

Some observers said there is nothing unusual about a company examining Soros’ financial motives, given his long and profitable history of shorting things. “FB management would have been absolutely remiss to not look into whether Soros was (again) manipulating a security for personal profit, to the detriment of the FB shareholder,” tweeted Antonio Garcia Martinez, a former employee. “He’s a hedge fund pirate answerable to no one, as bad as anyone on Wall Street. Why wouldn’t they check?”

And while much of the online hysteria about Soros amounts to little more than paranoid anti-Semitism, Sandberg’s query had come in response to a direct attack. (Soros had called Facebook, and also Google, “a menace to society.”) Viewed in this light, Sandberg’s initial email about Soros looks less like character assassination than it does corporate due diligence.

It’s not clear whether Soros had a short position in Facebook at the moment of Sandberg’s inquiry, though public filings point to no. In a quarterly holdings filing from Soros Fund Management during the first quarter of the year, the firm reported no positions in Facebook. It did, however, report about 25,000 shares of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, meaning that when Soros made his remarks about Google and Facebook in January, he likely stood to benefit if Google’s stock price went up.

For its part, Facebook says it had already begun examining Soros’ financial ties by the time Sandberg’s email landed. This, too, I find plausible: Facebook has a massive policy and communications team, and a high-profile activist investor had just called the company a menace on a world stage.

Still: at some point, Definers began working to seed anti-Soros stories in the press — at the same time that anti-Semitism around the world, often invoking Soros’ name, was mounting a terrifying resurgence. It’s the sort of thing you might expect a public-relations firm, paid to understand public perception, to have understood. But neither Definers nor Facebook’s own team seems to have grasped this until it was too late. (If you worked on these issues and you did flag this to a superior, my DMs are eternally open to you.)

So how did this Davos inquiry metastasize into dark-arts PR? In TechCrunch, Taylor Hatmaker sheds some additional light. Hatmaker reports that the company’s communications team, heavy with former Republican campaign operatives, drew Definers into its world and gradually expanded its role. And, she says, Sandberg knew about it:

As TechCrunch has learned — and Sandberg herself alluded to in a statement — Sandberg was also looped into emails about Definers, the team that later conducted research into Soros on Facebook’s behalf. Definers was also integrated more deeply into Facebook’s communications operations than has previously been reported.

People knowledgeable of Facebook’s inner workings and those outside of the company expressed surprise at Sandberg’s choice to initially deny any knowledge of the relationship with Definers. “Mark issued an absolute denial and Sheryl followed, which surprised all of us because we knew her denial wasn’t true,” a source familiar with the firm’s work told TechCrunch.

So where does that leave us? On one hand, I am not personally scandalized that Sandberg emailed her team in January to ask what the deal was with the guy calling their company a menace. Nor am I surprised that, when Facebook told its side of the Definers story originally, outgoing communications chief Elliot Schrage wrote largely using “we” pronouns and not dictating the precise flow of emails through the company as it worked to contain the Soros situation.

But the problem with hiring the kind of PR firms that mount whisper campaigns and spread misinformation is that every step leading up to that point, in hindsight, will look like part of the subterfuge. The revelation that Definers had “an in-house fake news shop,” as one former employee called it, meant that any explanation Facebook offered for hiring the firm would always look suspect.

Now the company is left telling us that the Definers contract didn’t start out as a shadowy conspiracy — it only ended up that way! And if that’s supposed to be comforting, it’s time for a new set of talking points.

Earlier this year, Facebook agreed to conduct a “civil rights audit” of the platform to in an effort to determine its impact on voter suppression and discrimination in housing, among other things. In a meeting with activists yesterday, Sandberg pledged to release part of it before the year’s end, Jessica Guynn reports.

Issie Lapowsky catches us up on the unanswered questions about the Pikini international incident:

Facebook’s filing lays out a series of pressing questions that the tech giant hopes to get answers to through a discovery process and cross-examination of the people involved. Those questions include: What was the nature of Kramer’s interactions with Cadwalladr? How did this Dropbox account get set up? Who had access, and what documents did it include? Why did Six4Three’s lawyers delete it? Why did it take Kramer several days to tell his lawyers that he had handed over this confidential information? And perhaps most puzzling of all, why was Kramer apparently more afraid of the repercussions from Parliament than from a court in the United States?

Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie gave a presentation in which he showed how the company used people’s expressed interests in fashion brands like L.L. Bean and Wrangler to target political ads during the 2016 election. Wylie, with his characteristic restraint, called this tactic a new “weapon of mass destruction.”

While Googlers debate the ethics of building a censored search engine in China, Tesla is already giving away highly sensitive data: users’ location, which it is apparently transmitting to the government in real time. And it’s not the only one:

More than 200 manufacturers, including Tesla, Volkswagen, BMW, Daimler, Ford, General Motors, Nissan, Mitsubishi and U.S.-listed electric vehicle startup NIO, transmit position information and dozens of other data points to government-backed monitoring centers, The Associated Press has found. Generally, it happens without car owners’ knowledge.

The automakers say they are merely complying with local laws, which apply only to alternative energy vehicles. Chinese officials say the data is used for analytics to improve public safety, facilitate industrial development and infrastructure planning, and to prevent fraud in subsidy programs.

Frankie Huang reports that WeChat groups have become a hotbed of Islamophobia:

Abroad, much of the Islamophobia among Chinese immigrants appears to be driven by conspiracy theories and false stories that begin on the Western far-right but are being transferred into Chinese popular consciousness through WeChat, the most popular messaging app in China. Although many other WeChat accounts with political content have been shut down in the last year, the censors appear to be ignoring—if not encouraging—this poisonous vector.

Unlike fake news posted on Facebook or Twitter, WeChat fake news tends to tunnel its way to users without ever being exposed to the light of day. Links are pushed by WeChat official accounts to subscribers, shared between contacts and in closed WeChat groups. I would be completely unaware of this genre of pieces if my parents hadn’t drawn my attention to them, even though some of them rack up views and shares in the tens of thousands.

Democrats are concerned about the surveillance technology that Amazon is selling to the US government, Davey Alba reports.

A group of seven House Democrats sent a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos Thursday demanding details about Amazon Rekognition — a facial recognition platform the company has aggressively pitched to law enforcement agencies. It is the third such letterand, like thosebefore it, raises questions about Rekognition’s accuracy and the possible chilling effect it might have on Americans exercising their First Amendment rights in public.

Here is a grim and barely believable story from Gavin Butler about how money lenders in China are demanding naked selfies from their customers as collateral. If the customers don’t pay up, the lenders release the nudes:

A number of dodgy lenders have realised that young shoppers are desperate for loans, and are demanding that customers hand over naked selfies as collateral. If the repayments aren’t made on time, the money lenders threaten to leak those selfies to the individual’s family and friends. Many also charge interest on the original loan, thus burying their victims further in debt and forcing them to send more pictures and videos. These kinds of transactions are known in China as “naked loan services.”

In 2016 a total of 10 gigabits of nudes from 161 young women—all of who were holding their photo IDs—were leaked online by microlenders. Most of the victims were aged between 19 and 23, and typically borrowed sums of money between $1,000 and $2,000, according to state media outlet China Youth Daily. Others were reportedly given the option to do sex work in order to pay off their loan.

Grindr’s president and former CTO Scott Chen deleted a post from his personal Facebook page in which he said he believed that marriage was only meant to be between a man and a woman, Mathew Rodriguez reports. I’m impressed by this act of reporting from Into in part because Grindr owns Into. I’d also say that, in my experience, Scott Chen is not the only Grindr user who is not really looking to get married right now!

Instagram is changing the way buildings are designed, Oliver Wainwright reports:

But the social media platform, now counting 800 million users – more than a tenth of the world’s population – has since grown to become one of the most influential forces in the way our environments are being shaped. For a place to be shared on Instagram is no longer a chance by-product of a photogenic design, but a primary concern that drives the ambitions of clients and designers. The idea of “doing it for the ’gram” has moved from the preserve of Like-hungry teens to board meeting discussions and multimillion pound budgets.

Architect David Tickle, of global mega-firm Hassell, first became aware of the phenomenon while presenting a design in a competition for a new public square in Sydney. “One of the judges said he really liked our scheme because it was ‘highly Instagrammable’,” he recalls. “We hadn’t designed it with that in mind, but we realised that the stacked layers of terraces that we had proposed lent itself well to … social moments that could be captured and shared. We joked about it then, but it’s now become part of our vocabulary and an important way that we think about projects.”

I really like this new feature from Instagram, which lets you share stories to a group of your real friends rather than everyone who happens to follow you. It’s maybe the smartest thing I’ve seen the app do yet to combat context collapse — a problem that is only going to grow on Instagram as more people leave Facebook for its cooler younger sibling.

At The Guardian, Kenan Malik argued that banning misgendering will shut down debate on trans issues and strike a blow to free speech. But in fact, the content free-for-all chills speech by allowing the dominant to control the parameters of debate, never letting discussion proceed past the pedantic obsession with names and pronouns.

I tend to be somewhat shy about media appearances, especially when it comes to TV. In the back of my mind, whenever I’m invited on, I wonder whether I’ll be able to discuss the day’s topic or whether I’m going to get roped into a debate over my own existence. I know many trans people who feel the same. If this isn’t harassment, I don’t know what is. Aside from the harm it does to trans people, it also impedes the free flow of ideas and debate, in the same way that conservatives often accuse student protesters of shutting down speech on college campuses.

Laura Loomer is a nationalist and a conspiracy theorist who previously made the news when she received lifetime bans from Uber and Lyft for making a series of anti-Muslim remarks about drivers. She also earned a lifetime ban from Twitter, and she protested on Thursday evening by handcuffing herself to the door of Twitter New York, Julia Alexander reports. In an inspired move, Twitter declined to press charges, and the New York Police Department declined to remove her from her spot. They simply took away her megaphone, and left her alone to scream in the dark.